Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

David Chandler, comments that the bombing turned “thousands of young Cambodians into participants in an anti-American crusade,” as it “destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK [Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution,” a “class warfare between the ‘base people,’ who had been bombed, and the ‘new people’ who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States.” “French intransigence had turned nationalists into Communists,” Philip Windsor observes, while “American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics.”34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of “base people,” and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse.